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Various updates

mood: anxious

Looks like my story, "Promise Them Aught," will be appearing in issue #7 of Apex Digest, as I got an "Issue Seven Contributor news" email from jason_sizemore today. Yippeee :-).

Finished (finally) a draft of "The Oracle of Building 42"--the story I've been working on for about a month. I want to look it over again tomorrow and then post it to the oww. I'm still thinking to submit this one for the Baycon Writers' Workshop. It will be my first experience with face-to-face humiliationworkshopping. Somehow it seems much easier to take in the relative anonymity of online...

Speaking of the oww, I've been participating in the "April crit marathon," and have come pretty close to my goal of a crit per day. One more, and I'll have my second bee!

I swiped some pics from the Caltrans website of the damage to the Coast Highway. Here's one:

Not only are there boulders and huge cracks in the asphalt, but the entire road-bed is sliding down the cliff into the sea.

Apart from the serious inconvenience to all local residents, I am having deja vu concerning one of the first stories I ever wrote (and the only one I've ended up trunking to date, in fact I don't even know where it is now). It had invasive species and an alien farmer who got people addicted to the rare alien fruit available only at his fruit-stand. Thing is, I located this stand at the entrance to the farm where my horse is now boarded. At the time of writing, I hadn't even imagined I'd ever have a horse of my own, nor did I know there was boarding at that farm. In my story, the same stretch of road was damaged (which is nothing new, it happens regularly), and my protagonist was so desperate to get to this fruit stand, that she tries to talk her way past the officer guarding the roadblock by telling him she had to go check on her poor horse. Is the universe trying to tell me something?

Other than all the above, I've been listening to the audio-book version of A Crack in the Edge of the World by Simon Winchester. It's about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the 100th Anniversary of which is coming up on April 18th.